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Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) was the founding father of Modern Orthodox Judaism. He was educated in secular German schools and received his Jewish education at the hands of rabbinic tutors. In 1851, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch left the chief rabbinate of Moravia, where over 50,000 Jews were under his jurisdiction, to assume the spiritual leadership of the fledgling independent kehillah of Frankfurt-am-Main, which could then boast of no more than one hundred families. That move was to have dramatic consequences not only for the Jews of Frankfurt, but for all Western Jewry down to our day. Armed only with the force of his personality and the eloquence of his pen, Rabbi Hirsch almost single-handedly arrested fifty years of unbroken ascendancy of Reform in Germany. While Hirsch adopted many of the stylistic changes of the Reform movement, he insisted on the preservation of the structure of rabbinic law as the best method for the preservation of Judaism. As a product of reform, he emphasized study of the biblical text, evidenced by his commentary on the Torah. Through his fiery rhetoric and powerful charisma, Hirsch became the founding father of what is known as Modern Orthodoxy. To young German Jews convinced that their Ju